Divine Plea Changes

I have mixed feelings about the new Guarded by the Light effect on Divine Plea, which causes it to refresh on every melee hit. On the one hand, it's very nice to never have to worry about mana again. So long as I remember to click the button, my mana regenerates at a rate fast enough that if anything is beating on me, I can't run out of mana. I haven't tried it on heroic bosses, but I'm guessing I could even use consecrate on heroic bosses without running out of mana now. I know that I can dps using consecration for a few minutes, so I'm assuming Blessing of Sanctuary would make up the difference. Plus, the 3% damage reduction from the glyph makes us the most durable tanks in the game, which I suppose we already were, but now we're even more durable.

However, there are two downsides to it. The first is that it's a return to the thirty second seal. For those of you too young to remember, we used to need to refresh our seal every thirty seconds or it would fall off. We would also need to refresh it after every judgement, though most of us used a macro for that. This meant that, before every fight, we would need to put up our seal, using a GCD. It's not like it was a big deal. It was just kind of annoying, and none of us were unhappy to see the situation change in 3.0.

The second downside is that it removes a lot of the skill from paladin tanking. I know the main thing that new paladin tanks ask me is, "How do you not run out of mana?". My usual response is something like, "Practice. And rarely consecrate". The main thing that separated a great pally tank from a good one was mana efficiency. Being a great pally tank was about managing the resource efficiently and effectively. Now that's just...gone. It's like having one of the main challenges of our class stripped away.

It strikes me that this is an example of Blizzard not understanding what "challenge" means, which has alienated so many raiders since 3.0. Holy paladin healing now includes keeping up four or five one minute buffs. That's not a challenge. That's annoying. All one needs is a buff bar mod (and the game is way too dependant on mods as it is) and it's easy. When dual specs came out, I was all happy to go holy and then I remembered: I've hated healing since 3.0. It's annoying. Stuff like this is why I not have a ret offspec.

On the other hand, maintaining mana efficiency was a genuine challenge. It took skill and foresight and separated the great tanks from the merely good ones. By changing Divine Plea as they have, this challenge goes away. They've taken away one of the most challenging aspects of the class and replaced it with an annoyance. Despite all the benefit to us from a purely power-level perspective, from a fun and challenge perspective the Divine Plea change is a sad day for protection paladins.